The Letters of Ambrose Bierce Part 18

I hope you don't mind the typewriter--_I_ don't.

Convey my love to all the sweet ladies of your entourage and make my compliments also to the Gang. Sincerely yours,

AMBROSE BIERCE.

[Was.h.i.+ngton, October 5, 1904.]

DEAR GEORGE,

Your latest was dated Sept. 10. I got it while alone in the mountains, but since then I have been in New York City and at West Point and--here. New York is too strenuous for me; it gets on my nerves.

Please don't persuade me to come to California--I mean don't _try_ to, for I can't, and it hurts a little to say nay. There's a big bit of my heart there, but--O never mind the reasons; some of them would not look well on paper. One of them I don't mind telling; I would not live in a state under union labor rule. There is still one place where the honest American laboring man is not permitted to cut throats and strip bodies of women at his own sweet will. That is the District of Columbia.

I am anxious to read Lilith; please complete it.

I have another note of rejection for you. It is from * * *. Knowing that you will not bank on what he says about the Metropolitan, I enclose it. I've acted on his advising and sent the poem. It is about time for it to come back. Then I shall try the other magazines until the list is exhausted.

Did I return your Jinks verses? I know I read them and meant to send them back, but my correspondence and my papers are in such hopeless disorder that I'm all at sea on these matters. For aught I know I may have elaborately "answered" the letter that I think myself to be answering now. I liked the verses very temperately, not madly.

Of course you are right about the magazine editors not knowing poetry when they see it. But who does? I have not known more than a half-dozen persons in America that did, and none of them edited a magazine.

No, I did not write the "Urus-Agricola-Acetes stuff," though it was written _for_ me and, I believe, at my suggestion. The author was "Jimmy" Bowman, of whose death I wrote a sonnet which is in Black Beetles. He and I used to have a lot of fun devising literary mischiefs, fighting sham battles with each other and so forth. He was a clever chap and a good judge of whiskey.

Yes, in The Cynic's Dictionary I did "jump from A to M." I had previously done the stuff in various papers as far as M, then lost the beginning. So in resuming I re-did that part (quite differently, of course) in order to have the thing complete if I should want to make a book of it. I guess the Examiner isn't running much of it, nor much of anything of mine.

I like your love of Keats and the early Coleridge.

Sincerely yours, AMBROSE BIERCE.

[The N. Y. American Office, Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C., October 12, 1904.]

MY DEAR DAVIS,

The "bad eminence" of turning down Sterling's great poem is one that you will have to share with some of your esteemed fellow magazinists--for examples, the editors of the Atlantic, Harper's, Scribner's, The Century, and now the Metropolitan, all of the elite.

All of these gentlemen, I believe, profess, as you do not, to know literature when they see it, and to deal in it.

Well I profess to deal in it in a small way, and if Sterling will let me I propose some day to ask judgment between them and me.

Even _you_ ask for literature--if my stories are literature, as you are good enough to imply. (By the way, all the leading publishers of the country turned down that book until they saw it published without them by a merchant in San Francisco and another sort of publishers in London, Leipzig and Paris.) Well, you wouldn't do a thing to one of my stories!

No, thank you; if I have to write rot, I prefer to do it for the newspapers, which make no false pretences and are frankly rotten, and in which the badness of a bad thing escapes detection or is forgotten as soon as it is cold.

I know how to write a story (of the "happy ending" sort) for magazine readers for whom literature is too good, but I will not do so so long as stealing is more honorable and interesting.

I've offered you the best stuff to be had--Sterling's poem--and the best that I am able to make; and now you must excuse me. I do not doubt that you really think that you would take "the kind of fiction that made 'Soldiers and Civilians' the most readable book of its kind in this country," and it is nice of you to put it that way; but neither do I doubt that you would find the story sent a different kind of fiction and, like the satire which you return to me, "out of the question." An editor who has a preformed opinion of the kind of stuff that he is going to get will always be disappointed with the stuff that he does get.

I know this from my early experience as an editor--before I learned that what I needed was, not any particular kind of stuff, but just the stuff of a particular kind of writer.

All this without any feeling, and only by way of explaining why I must ask you to excuse me.

Sincerely yours, AMBROSE BIERCE.

[Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C., December 6, 1904.]

DEAR GEORGE,

Yes, I got and read that fool thing in the August Critic. I found in it nothing worse than stupidity--no malice. Doubtless you have not sounded the deeper deeps of stupidity in critics, and so are driven to other motives to explain their unearthly errors. I know from my own experience of long ago how hard it is to accept abominable criticism, obviously (to the criticee) unfair, without attributing a personal mean motive; but the attribution is nearly always erroneous, even in the case of a writer with so many personal enemies as I. You will do well to avoid that weakness of the tyro. * * * has the infirmity in an apparently chronic form. Poets, by reason of the sensibilities that _make_ them poets, are peculiarly liable to it. I can't see any evidence that the poor devil of the Critic knew better.

The Wine of Wizardry is at present at the Booklovers'. It should have come back ere this, but don't you draw any happy augury from that: I'm sure they'll turn it down, and am d.a.m.ning them in advance.

I had a postal from * * * a few days ago. He was in Paris. I've written him only once, explaining by drawing his attention to the fact that one's reluctance to write a letter increases in the ratio of the square of the distance it has to go. I don't know why that is so, but it is--at least in my case.

Yes, I'm in perfect health, barring a bit of insomnia at times, and enjoy life as much as I ever did--except when in love and the love prospering; that is to say, when it was new.

Sincerely yours, AMBROSE BIERCE.

[Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C., December 8, 1904.]

DEAR GEORGE,

This is the worst yet! This jobbernowl seems to think "The Wine of Wizardry" a story. It should "arrive" and be "dramatic"--the denouement being, I suppose, a particularly exciting example of the "happy ending."

My dear fellow, I'm positively ashamed to throw your pearls before any more of these swine, and I humbly ask your pardon for having done it at all. I guess the "Wine" will have to await the publication of your next book.

But I'd like to keep this fellow's note if you will kindly let me have it. Sometime, when the poem is published, I shall paste it into a little sc.r.a.p book, with all the notes of rejection, and then if I know a man or two capable of appreciating the humor of the thing I can make merry over it with them.

Sincerely yours, AMBROSE BIERCE.

[The Army and Navy Club, Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C., My permanent address, February 18, 1905.]

DEAR GEORGE,

It's a long time since the date of your latest letter, but I've been doing two men's work for many weeks and have actually not found the leisure to write to my friends. As it is the first time that I've worked really hard for several years I ought not to complain, and don't. But I hope it will end with this session of Congress.